Monday, September 2, 2019

The University of Chicago's Booth school reviews school choice, with particular attention to Booth scholars:Economics is changing how public schools and students choose each other"Chicago Booth’s Seth Zimmerman got interested in school lotteries as an economics graduate student at Yale in the late 2000s. ..."Chicago Booth’s Eric Budish and UPenn’s Judd Kessler have found similar results [about families confused by complexity] for course allocation at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (see “You can’t always say what you want,” below). ..."In their research on New Haven’s schools, Zimmerman and his coresearchers wanted to quantify the effects of this sort of inequality, and particularly to understand how it played out in a system even more strategically complicated than New York’s. Past research assumed either that students and their families were strategizing correctly or that they were making one of a limited number of possible mistakes, such as not knowing their own priority group or playing naively by simply listing their choices in order of their preferences. ..."The researchers tried developing an app that would increase families’ understanding of their odds and help them strategize accurately. But they soon saw that simply adopting a truth-telling approach made more sense. Their work found an audience in New Haven Public Schools, and for the 2019--–20 school year, the city began employing a matching algorithm similar to New York’s...."Chicago Booth’s Jacob Leshno says that currently most districts don’t use TTC systems, and he suggests a potential reason many have opted for DA instead: TTC systems are harder to explain to students who don’t get the schools they want. ..."However, Leshno and Stanford’s Irene Lo wanted to help administrators make full use of their options for school-matching systems by providing tools to help explain how TTC school-assignment algorithms work. Their research demonstrates it’s possible to explain matches under TTC systems to students and parents using the same palatable notion that applies to DA systems, removing a big impediment to their implementation."